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How the grandparents of today’s Christian victims of ISIS were Editor’s Note: The following review was written by Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The book reviewed is Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, a History (published by the Oxford University Press, 2016), by Joseph Yacoub, an Honorary Professor of Political Science at Catholic University of Lyon. A significantly shorter version of this review first appeared in the Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2017. This important contribution to genocide studies documents how the world’s oldest Christian communities—variously referred to as Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Arameans,...

Tragic stories of Christian experiences under the Islamic State continued to emerge throughout the month of January.  A Christian doctor who forfeited the chance to escape his Syrian village after ISIS had captured it because he wanted to stay and help the sick and needy, both Christian and Muslim, was kidnapped by the Muslim terrorists and ordered to renounce Christ for Muhammad.  When he refused, they publicly slaughtered him. Similarly, after ISIS ordered another Christian youth in Syria to embrace Islam, he too refused and was slaughtered for it.  His mother—who was prevented from burying her martyred son’s body—recalled that...

Why Is General Mattis Nominating the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’s Stooge’? A familiar face from the Obama disaster in Egypt. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’ pick for undersecretary of defense for policy, Anne Patterson, is problematic. Politico briefly explains why: If nominated and confirmed, Patterson would hold the fourth most powerful position at the Pentagon -- and would effectively be the top civilian in the Defense Department, since both Mattis and his deputy, Robert Work, were military officers. As ambassador to Egypt between 2011 and 2013, Patterson worked closely with former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist government. She came under...

A familiar face from the Obama disaster in Egypt. Reprinted from PJ Media. Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’ pick for undersecretary of defense for policy, Anne Patterson, is problematic.Politico briefly explains why: If nominated and confirmed, Patterson would hold the fourth most powerful position at the Pentagon -- and would effectively be the top civilian in the Defense Department, since both Mattis and his deputy, Robert Work, were military officers.   As ambassador to Egypt between 2011 and 2013, Patterson worked closely with former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his...

Another month of atrocities—any of which, if they were committed by Christians against Muslims, would’ve received mass media coverage. Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Reports of Christian life under the Islamic State (ISIS) continued throughout November. Many of these came from the ancient Christian towns surrounding Mosul, such as Batnaya and Qaraqosh, conquered by ISIS in August, 2014, and liberated in late October, 2016. One Christian man, Esam, from Qaraqosh, related what ISIS did after his sister's husband refused to convert to Islam: "He was crucified and tortured in front...

At a time when Western people are constantly warned to speak respectfully of Muhammad, or else offended Muslims might respond with violence — to the shame and blame of those who exercise their freedom of expression — consider what Muslims regularly say about the things non-Muslims hold dear.Recently during his televised Arabic-language program, Dr. Salem Abdul Galil — previously deputy minister of Egypt’s religious endowments for preaching — gleefully declared that, among other Biblical women (Moses’ sister and Pharaoh’s wife), “our prophet Muhammad — prayers and peace be upon him — will be married to Mary the Virgin in paradise.” (Note:...

“Now Is Time to Behead Unbelievers” The jihad on churches -- including those in America and Europe. Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Reports of Muslims torturing, raping, and forcing Christians to embrace Islam continued to mount throughout the month of October.   Alice Assaf, a Christian woman recounted the experiences of Christians—including her son’s execution for refusing to deny his faith—in a village near Damascus at the hands of the Islamic State.  She also told how the Islamic State massacres children in cruel and unusual ways—including by throwing them...

Although Western media regularly find no “motive” for many of the Islamic attacks on non-Muslims, many are by now at least vaguely aware that the Muslim perpetrators rely on generic Islamic teachings that foster hostility for “infidels.”   Yet often overlooked are the very stringent and detailed Islamic rulings behind many terror attacks. Take the recent attack on St. Peter’s Cathedral in Egypt, which left at least 25 Christian worshippers—the majority of whom were women and children—dead and which ISIS claimed.  While many might write it off as just a generic attack targeting Coptic Christian “infidels,” the reality is that...

Do you know the difference between a supremacist grievance and an egalitarian grievance? This is the key to understanding the widely held claim that Muslim grievances are the source of Muslim violence. Take the latest Muslim attack on U.S. soil. Last week, Abdul Razak Ali Artan -- an 18-year-old Muslim refugee from Somalia, who was receiving aid from Catholic charities -- rammed his car into a building at Ohio State University. He then got out and stabbed people with a butcher knife. He was eventually shot and killed by a guard; 13 people were hospitalized. Why did he do it? According to the "experts,"...

Documented: Obama’s ‘Traditional Muslim Bias’ against Christians The difference between active and passive persecution. Reprinted from the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom CenterAlmost a year ago, President Barack Hussein Obama described the suggestion that the U.S. give preference to Christian refugees over Muslim refugees as “shameful.” “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” he loftily added. Now, WikiLeaks has released a 2008 email discussing who should fill top staff positions should Obama win the presidency.  It clearly proves that the Obama administration is the...

Huma Abedin’s Troubling Saudi Upbringing Which is synonymous with saying “ISIS upbringing." Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Allegations concerning Huma Abedin’s connections to Islamist groups and actors devoted to taking down America through a subversive jihad is no secret.  But for those in the know about Islam, its goals and methods—and especially the power of indoctrination—her life story is more than enough for concern. Born in the U.S., Huma moved to Saudi Arabia (SA) at the age of two.  There, she likely spent her formative years being indoctrinated in the same Islam that...

A decade after U.S. leadership declared a “war on terror,” all it has to show for it is the creation of the Islamic State—an Islamic body that has taken terror and atrocities to a whole new level. How did this happen? A key factor often overlooked is the intelligence community’s failures concerning what fuels the jihadis. Consider Michael Scheuer, author of the 2004 national bestseller Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. Scheuer’s credentials as described in that book are impressive: “For the past seventeen years, my career has focused exclusively on terrorism, Islamic insurgencies, militant...

ACTRESS Brigitte Bardot has led calls for Muslims in France not to slaughter animals in public during this weekend's Eid celebrations. ... In France the government has been providing skips because many followers discard their carcasses to rot in the streets after they have killed them. ... Thousands of Muslims order sheep and then go to their local abattoirs to kill them to celebrate the feast of the slaughter, while others still carry out the acts in the street. However, Ms Bardot, 81, has called for practising Muslims to avoid making religious sacrifices in public particularly after terror attacks in...

More reports of the brutal treatment that Christians and other minorities experienced at the hands of the Islamic State (SIS) emerged during May. One account told of a couple who, after their children were abducted by ISIS militants, answered their door one day to find a plastic bag on their doorstep. It contained the body parts of their daughters and a video of them being brutally tortured and raped.

An old (and tiresome) debate appears to have been settled by those best positioned to settle it. According to Andrew Gripp, a former political science professor: Since 9/11, one of the defining fault lines in American and Western politics has concerned whether jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS are motivated by their religion or by politics – or more specifically, by grievances against Western foreign policy. Some insist that Islamic doctrine is the basis of their violence, while others insist that such groups are not truly Islamic, but are instead using the guise of religion to lash out against...

The most efficient way of solving a problem is to first break it down to its simplest parts—its bare-bone elements. This was the ultimate point of a recent article where I asserted that: When it comes to the connection between Islam and violence against non-Muslims, one fact must be embraced: the majority of those in positions of leadership and authority in the West are either liars or fools, or both. No other alternative exists. Both in the comments section on my site as well as those of other websites that carried the article, and through emails, many begged to differ....

Are Western women responsible for provoking Muslim men into raping them? Some Europeans certainly seem to think so. Recently, after a 20-year-old Austrian woman waiting at a bus stop in Vienna was attacked, beat, and robbed by four Muslim men from Afghanistan—including one who “started [by] putting his hands through my hair and made it clear that in his cultural background there were hardly any blonde women”—police responded by telling the victim to dye her hair: At first I was scared, but now I'm more angry than anything. After the attack they told me that women shouldn't be alone on...

The Orlando Massacre Is Just the Beginning Everything that led to it is still well entrenched. June 14, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim    Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. What is the greatest lesson of the Orlando massacre, where a Muslim shooter killed at least 50 people at a homosexual night club—an event that is now considered the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since the September 11 attacks of 2001?  It’s that such an attack had to happen—and is destined to happen again.  Why?  Because the surest way of seeing an act occur repeatedly—say a terrorist attack—is...

The Jihad on Christian Church Tents It’s not enough to ban, bomb, and burn church buildings. May 25, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim    Note: Raymond Ibrahim was interviewed about this article on Ave Maria Radio’s “Kresta in the Afternoon.”Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.A Christian church in Egypt was recently torched to the ground.  According to a statement by the Coptic Christian diocese in Minya, Upper Egypt: “The Virgin Mary Church in Ismailiyah, which is about four miles north of Minya, was exposed to an attack by some extremists who set fire...

The West Lies Down Before Saudi Lies The greatest exporters of Islamic terrorism moralize at the Munich Security Conference. May 11, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim    Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Saudi Arabia—the world’s greatest hypocrite—is at it again. On February 12, 2016, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) was held.  It’s described as “the world's largest gathering of its kind”; “the most important independent forum for the exchange of views by international security policy decision-makers,” where “about 350 senior figures from more than 70 countries around the world to engage in an intensive...